Embrace the dark side:SELinux

It's annoying.
It works.

If you've got a home directory somewhere else than /home, you might have some funny business. It usually shows up as "/usr/bin/xauth: timeout in locking authority file .Xauthority". Some other security related things stop working too.

This is how all that goes away.

Edit /etc/selinux/semanage.conf
usepassword=True
yum install policycoreutils-python

Clone the context from the standard home directory layout into the new home directory, my users are under /test, i.e., /test/user
semanage fcontext -a -e /home /test
restorecon -R /test

Job done, everything works as intended.

VirtualBox & VERR_NOT_SUPPORTER with VMDK

So, you've got your 2GB-split VMDK and you want to import to your local Virtualbox and it's not working at all:

hakan@hakan-laptop:16:29:36:~/snafu$ VBoxManage showhdinfo demo.vmdk

VBoxManage: error: Could not get the storage format of the medium '/home/hakan/snafu/demo.vmdk' (VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED)
VBoxManage: error: Details: code VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80bb0005), component Medium, interface IMedium, callee nsISupports

The version of Virtualbox on Ubuntu 15.04 is not capable of handling this format at the moment. Install Qemu-tools and do the conversion there and stop wasting time:

time qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O vdi demo.vmdk demo.vdi 

Now that's better:

hakan@hakan-laptop:16:37:34:~/snafu$ VBoxManage  showhdinfo demo.vdi
UUID:           24142e20-6273-499a-8bbf-2ae8e27c1cef
Parent UUID:    base
State:          created
Type:           normal (base)
Location:       /home/hakan/snafu/demo.vdi
Storage format: VDI
Format variant: dynamic default
Capacity:       20480 MBytes
Size on disk:   19816 MBytes